Shutting Up Cell Phones

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Shutting Up Cell Phones

If you want to neutralize pesky adversaries in wartime, disrupt their communications. If you want to do the same in peacetime, disable their mobile phones.

By selling a frequency jammer that prevents mobile-phone communications over a limited area, an Israeli company has taken a classic swords-to-plowshares approach in commercializing a military technology.

Picture the benefits: By silencing all the mobile phones in a restaurant, movie theater, or concert hall, you can disconnect all those social boors unwilling to shut off their phones themselves.

"Education, detectors, signs – all have proven to be ineffective," says Tammy Neufeld, spokeswoman for Netline Communications Technologies, a Tel Aviv company that sells jammers. "Cellular phone operators are earning billions of dollars at the expense of people's quality of life."

But in selling this unique revenge against the mobile hordes, the Israelis are encountering a powerful adversary not seen on the battlefield: government regulators.

On 10 March, the Australian Communications Authority banned the device in that country, saying it could interfere with emergency services, leave businesses' on-call personnel out of reach, and possibly interfere with other devices.

In making its decision, the ACA said its role is to facilitate access to spectrum, not deny it. It recommended less drastic measures in dealing with mobile phones, such as signs, announcements, and encouraging people to use their phone's silent messaging feature.

By emitting a kind of electromagnetic white noise, jammers prevent mobile phones from exchanging "handshake" signals with their closest mobile-phone tower. Within range of the jammer, the mobile-phone system is tricked into believing that the user is out of range or has the unit switched off. The jammer can disrupt mobile communication over an area ranging from several meters to several kilometers.